Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
January 2, 2011

Scripture:

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

So in the story we just heard three kings come to worship the baby Jesus, right? No? Not right? But we’ve always sung “We Three Kings” on Epiphany like we did this morning, haven’t we? So they’re kings, right? Or am I supposed to believe that the hymn, which is about the only Epiphany hymn any of us knows, is wrong? But surely that can’t be. The church wouldn’t have us singing a hymn that got the story it’s telling wrong, would it?

Well, yes, apparently it would. Matthew’s story that we just heard, which is the source of the three kings we’ve always heard about, says nothing about kings being led by a star to see the baby Jesus. Yes, some people are led by a star to see the baby Jesus, but they aren’t kings. They are “magi,” that is, they are wise men, probably astrologers from Persia. They most definitely are not kings. There’s only one king in Matthew’s story. That’s Herod, the king of the Jews, and as the story goes on he tries to kill Jesus, not worship him. In Matthew’s story no kings worship Jesus.

Yet those of us who grew up in the Christian tradition, and maybe some of you who didn’t., have always heard and sung about three kings. The fact of the matter is that the Christian tradition turned the unspecified number of magi—that’s right, Matthew doesn’t say how many of them there were—into three kings. And it turns out that the tradition did so pretty early on, perhaps as early as the third century CE. It seems that from very early on Christians have wanted Matthew’s mysterious visitors led by a star to a house in Bethlehem to be kings not wise men, as Matthew clearly says they are. And recently I’ve been asking why. Why does the Christian tradition so want the wise men to be kings, which in Matthew’s story they clearly are not? I don’t have a definitive answer to the question why kings, but I want to spend some time with the question this morning and to suggest at least one possible answer to it.

And as I so often do, I want to start with some history. The wise men morphed into kings in the third or fourth century CE. That was a time when Christianity was growing and becoming respectable in the Roman Empire, but it was also a time when Christians were on occasion at least subjected to brutal persecution by that same Roman Empire. One of the dynamics of that historical setting was that Christianity was doing everything it could to convince the Roman Empire that it was no threat to imperial authority. Properly understood, of course, Christianity is a profound threat to imperial power, but the Christians of the third and fourth centuries CE were trying to become socially acceptable and to get the imperial authorities off their backs. So they did a number of things to try to convince Rome that Christianity was harmless.

That effort actually started in the late first century CE. We see it in the way the Gospels tell the story of Jesus’ crucifixion. It was of course the Romans who crucified Jesus, but by the time the Gospels were written in the last quarter of the first century Christian writers were blaming the Jews not the Romans. Why? Because they were trying to get the Romans off their backs by convincing the empire that they were no threat. Matthew in particular blames the Jews in some of the most brutal anti-Semitic language in the whole New Testament. In the Gospels Pilate, the representative of Roman power, finds no fault in Jesus. That is historically improbable at best, but it makes sense if we put the Passion story in its historical context of a time when Christianity was trying to make nice with the Romans. We see the same thing in the first seven verses of the thirteenth chapter of Romans. Those verses are almost certainly a later insertion into Paul’s letter and not by Paul at all. They say that all power comes from God and that the Christian’s duty is to be obedient to the secular authorities. Jesus wasn’t obedient to the secular authorities, and neither was Paul; but never mind. Those verses say to the empire “we’re no threat. Stop picking on us.” Even before Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire Christians were trying very hard to convince the Romans that they didn’t have to worry about them.

They saw, I suspect, another way to make that point in Matthew’s story of the magi. In that story Herod gets it that Christianity is a threat to oppressive secular power. That’s why he tries to kill Jesus. The way Matthew wrote the story Jesus appears as a real threat to kings everywhere. In that story Jesus, who is Wisdom personified, speaks to the wisdom of the Gentiles not to the kings. But early Christianity knew a different Scripture passage too. That’s the other passage we heard this morning, Isaiah 60:1-6. That passage talks about kings coming to Jerusalem and offering gifts of frankincense and gold, two of the three gifts Matthew’s magi give to Jesus. How convenient! We’ll just turn Matthew’s magi into the kings of Isaiah 60, and the Romans will see that we’re no threat to kings! Kings worship Jesus, and kings don’t worship anything that is a threat to them. So kings they became. Turning the magi into kings was, I suspect, part of early Christianity’s effort to transform itself into something that is totally compatible with earthly power, totally compatible with empire. And whether or not the early tradition knew that that’s what it was doing the truth remains that Christianity did accommodate itself to empire. It still does.

The magi became kings, I’m guessing, because Christianity was accommodating itself to imperial power. Yet as John Dominic Crossan is saying over and over again these days, Christianity really is a threat to empire. Jesus taught a way that is completely at odds with the way of empire. Empires are about violence, Jesus was about nonviolence. Empires are good for the wealthy elite, Jesus is good for the rest of us. Empires are always unjust, Jesus preached justice. Herod was right. Jesus really is a threat to kings.

And as is always true with any good analysis of a Bible story this analysis leads us to ask: Are we doing the same thing the early Christian tradition did? Are we domesticating Christianity, pulling its teeth, making it politically and socially innocuous, making it a banal faith that preaches nothing but harmless platitudes or that speaks only about the next world, not about this one? Most of Christianity has done precisely that since at least the fourth century CE, when the faith became established as the official faith of the Roman Empire. So we have to ask: Are we too pulling our punches with regard to the radical nature of Jesus’ message? Are we giving our blessing to powers who engage in violence and perpetuate injustice? Are we spending too much time looking inward, inward into the church and inward into our souls, and not enough time looking outward, going to the world with Jesus’ prophetic message of peace and justice? I’m not going to try to answer those questions this morning. I suggest only that they are questions that we could examine to good effect in the year that has just started.

So why kings? Maybe it’s just that we’re infatuated with worldly power more than we are with worldly wisdom, more infatuated with kings than with wise men and women. But maybe it’s because we want to say to power “See? We’re no threat to you. Worldly powers can worship Jesus too.” Is that what we’re saying when we make the magi kings? And if we are, is that OK? Amen.